PORTSMOUTH -- After 36 years in business, first owning a Pier 1 imports franchise, then rebranding it as Abode, Carl Rohacek is going out of business and closing the Abode store.
Pier 1 first catered to counter-culture clientele, baby boomers coming-of-age during the Vietnam War and buying Indian print bedspreads, incense and Mexican hand-blown glass. At Abode, those staples remained, while sales shifted to furniture and made about half Rohacek’s numbers.
But business has been declining at the 775 Lafayette Road store, he said last week, explaining the Great Recession began to hit his business hard in 2007.
“It took us a long time to recover,” he said. “And I’m not sure we fully recovered.”
More people are also shopping online, he said, making it “a tougher market.”
“We used to get affluent snow birds in the spring and summer, but they stopped coming,” he added.
After thinking about it for the past year, Rohacek said he’s closing the store, everything including the fixtures will be sold at discounts and he’s, “going to find out what it’s like to do nothing.”
Rohacek’s story about longevity as a retailer began in 1973 when he started working as a Boston-based Pier 1 training manager. He moved around for that job for a decade and was offered store-management positions, but all were in places he didn’t want to live, he said. Rohacek was living north of Boston, said he liked visiting the Portsmouth area and after seeing Pier 1 potential in Portsmouth, opened the Mirona Road franchise in 1983.
He recalled the buzz around town at the time was that the Mirona Road area was going “to be a big shopping area, but that never happened.” So two years later, he moved into the plaza with the Bratskeller restaurant and “found immediate success.”
To stock his store, he traveled to the Philippines for crates filled with baskets and fan-back chairs, or to Hong Kong for wicker furniture.
In the early days, Rohacek said, he’d open crates he bought that were filled with antique brass goddesses, “like museum pieces they would never let out of the country now.” He bought wooden crates filled with hand-carved masks made in foreign lands, and would display them so they looked like “you just tipped over a treasure chest.”
At one point, Rohacek said, his Portsmouth franchise and one in Portland, Maine, were the top-earning Pier 1 retailers in the country.
In 1995, he and his former business partner Mike Roche relocated to Lafayette Road and in 2006 they rebranded to Abode.
“We automatically lost 25% to 35% of our business,” Rohacek said, even though the store was largely the same, because they were their own buyers.
Because of the recession, he said, people were more frugal, while they also began shopping online. Large furniture chains began cutting into his furniture market and costs went up, including for the health insurance he buys for his full-time employees. The 23,000-square-foot store began to feel too large and he was unable to figure out how to divide it.
So on Black Friday, Rohacek began offering his merchandise at 25% off across the board. On Monday, the holiday sale will change over to a “store closing” sale.
“My business partner retired six years ago,” he said. “I agonized over this for a year.”
The last day Abode will be in business will be Dec. 31 and until then, he said, “I’m hoping people will come out.”
Discounts will be taken on the discounts as inventory dwindles, while Rohacek said he expects to be seeing a lot of familiar faces. He’s also encouraging customers with gift cards to use them during the next four weeks.
Rohacek called Portsmouth “one of the easiest markets I’ve ever worked in.” He said he went years without a single bad check and customers became friends.
“Do some traveling,” is among his future personal plans. “I’d like to do a little more hiking and that kind of thing. Be a man of leisure for a while. I’m 68 and I’m ready to have some fun.”
http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/20191130/portsmouths-abode-closing-after-36-years
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